I've been using a 32gb drive (sandisk cruzer fit) for a couple of months and it works great! I have the HK, non-nav stereo. Whenever I want to add new music to the drive I delete then recopy everything over. I have the music arranged into artist folders, with this method the folders are arranged alphabetically when browsing on the stereo. The stereo displays the folders in the order in which they were added to the drive, and this recopy method has worked out well for me. Overall I love having all of my music on the flash drive.

How many GB of music do you have on your 32GB flash drive, and does your stereo recognize all of your music (is all of your music available for playback)?

Was reading the owners manual for my '13 and the books say the largest USB size is 8GB.

Any one tried a larger key? Say 32GB?

I have a 2012 Outback Limited with the non-nav Harmon-Karmon sound system, which I think has fantastic sound.

I have written several posts on USB storage limitations. I use Kingston flash drives, and have tried 32GB, 16GB, and 8GB. After reading other posts, I purchased a Sandisk brand 16GB, and was very disappointed with it - I have tried copying my 13GB of favorite music twice to the Sandisk, and both times the HK displays all of the music scrambled, in no particular order. With the Kingstons, the music is displayed in the order it was copied from my PC. I don't plan on buying Sandisk again.

When I first put my Kingston 16GB with 13GB of music, the HK only displayed about half of my music. I read in the manual that there are limitations on the number of folders, so I spent hours combining songs in fewer folders. Still, all of my music wasn't playable. I had to reduce my music to 7.8GB and eliminate most folders (on the 16GB drive) to get all my songs playable. This is the only thing I don't like about my HK.

The dealer loaned me a 2011 Legacy with the HK navigation unit, and it played all 13GB of my music. So, apparently, if you have the nav unit, you can play more music.

How many GB of music do you have on your 32GB flash drive, and does your stereo recognize all of your music (is all of your music available for playback)?

I have 16.3GB in 76 folders, and all of it is recognized. My artist folders are arranged alphabetically in a folder on on my computer, so I just copy over the main folder and it's displayed in alphabetical order on my HK stereo.

My 32GB SanDisk Fit came in. Tiny little bugger. I put 24GB of music on it (with around 2500 songs in 7 folders) and the radio has found everything without any issue! Guess the owner's guide needs an update....

Try formatting it with a different file system and see if your head unit can recognize it.

That's not my point, you stated that a USB drive uses FAT as if that is the only file system that it be formatted to. I was simply stating that is not the case.

Besides, most USB drives nowadays ship formatted to FAT32 since FAT(16) doesn't support long file names, wastes more space due to larger cluster sizes and is limited by the number of entries (ie files) it can handle.

I have a FAT32 thumbdrive that I threw an MP3 on. I'll give it a shot and then format it to NTFS and see if the the car will still recognize it. For s & g's I'll even try exFAT.

Actually, the car audio system does not sort the files in any order. It lists the files in the order in which the file entries are stored on disk, which is the order in which they are copied to disk.

A USB drive uses the FAT file system. Directory/file entries are stored separately from the actual file content. Each file entry has a pointer to where its data starts. Thus, file entries could be sorted in an arbitrary order without having to move the content of the files. That means that the operation can be done very fast.

Built-in windows utilities do not come with this functionality, but it would not be that hard to write an app to do that. Not saying that it is trivial, implementing it would take many hours, but it is not a difficult problem to solve. There might be some apps like that out there already.

Just got my new 2013 OB 3.6 Limited and I'm having trouble with playing music from a USB drive.

I can't make heads or tails of how it is determining what files to play inside a folder on a USB drive. It's not alphabetical and it's not by file date created or file date modified.

Any clues on how to get songs in a folder on a USB stick to play in the order that you wish in the OB?

In my 2010 OB this was by data created. The 2013 has me totally confused.

@Gerrywaz, I do not have an OB yet, but most portable audio players and car audio system play the files in the order in which they are stored on the disk.

Unfortunately, I do not know of any option in Windows that enables you to see the files unsorted, that is, in the order in which they are stored. Windows Explorer sorts files alphabetically, by modified date, by type (extension), or by size. Showing them unsorted would be faster, but it is not an option.

If you have Linux, you can list the files unsorted using "ls -f1 /path/to/directory/".

Strangely, the same command does not produce an unsorted listing in Cygwin or MacOS (I just tried), although they both provide a Unix like environment.

An internet search shows that there are a few Windows applications that do what I was describing in my initial post. That is, sort files in alphabetical order on a FAT file system without copying the files to a different disk and back. I've heard of cases where even copying the files to an empty drive, does not always copy them in alphabetical order.

You may try one of these two apps: DriveSort, or FAT Sorter.
The first one seems more complete, but I did not personally use either of them.
Still, let us know if you run into any issues or if it fixes your problem, in case that you try this. It may help other people.

Register Now

In order to be able to post messages on the Subaru Outback - Subaru Outback Forums forums, you must first register.
Please enter your desired user name, your email address and other required details in the form below.

User Name:

If you do not want to register, fill this field only and the name will be used as user name for your post.

Password

Please enter a password for your user account. Note that passwords are case-sensitive.